The Chinese drama made further progress in the Ming epoch.  Many of the finest Chinese dramas were written under the Ming; they are still produced again and again to this day.  The most famous dramatists of the Ming epoch are Wang Shih-chen (1526-1590) and T’ang Hsien-tsu (1556-1617).  T’ang wrote the well-known drama Mu-tan-t’ing ("The Peony Pavillion"), one of the finest love-stories of Chinese literature, full of romance and remote from all reality.  This is true also of the other dramas by T’ang, especially his “Four Dreams”, a series of four plays.  In them a man lives in dream through many years of his future life, with the result that he realizes the worthlessness of life and decides to become a monk.

Together with the development of the drama (or, rather, the opera) in the Ming epoch went an important endeavour in the modernization of music, the attempt to create a “well-tempered scale” made in 1584 by Chu Tsai-yue.  This solved in China a problem which was not tackled till later in Europe.  The first Chinese theorists of music who occupied themselves with this problem were Ching Fang (77-37 B.C.) and Ho Ch’eng-t’ien (A.D. 370-447).

In the Mongol epoch, most of the Chinese painters had lived in central China; this remained so in the Ming epoch.  Of the many painters of the Ming epoch, all held in high esteem in China, mention must be made especially of Ch’iu Ying (c. 1525), T’ang Yin (1470-1523), and Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555-1636).  Ch’iu Ying painted in the Academic Style, indicating every detail, however small, and showing preference for a turquoise-green ground.  T’ang Yin was the painter of elegant women; Tung became famous especially as a calligraphist and a theoretician of the art of painting; a textbook of the art was written by him.

Just as puppet plays and shadow theatre are the “opera of the common man” and took a new development in Ming time, the wood-cut and block-printing developed largely as a cheap substitute of real paintings.  The new urbanites wanted to have paintings of the masters and found in the wood-cut which soon became a multi-colour print a cheap mass medium.  Block printing in colours, developed in the Yangtze valley, was adopted by Japan and found its highest refinement there.  But the Ming are also famous for their monumental architecture which largely followed Mongol patterns.  Among the most famous examples is the famous Great Wall which had been in dilapidation and was rebuilt; the great city walls of Peking; and large parts of the palaces of Peking, begun in the Mongol epoch.  It was at this time that the official style which we may observe to this day in North China was developed, the style employed everywhere, until in the age of concrete it lost its justification.